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Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Development as it really is

Prevailing wages will be low..As will be the cost of food, shelter, and clothing..This is how it is in your typical so called undeveloped country.

In a process called "development", we destroy existing networks of non-monetary reciprocity by introducing consumer products that are unavailable locally and can only be purchased with money.

Meanwhile, we establish factories or other facilities to remove people from the non-monetary economy to earn a wage.

The former is known as "opening the market" .And the latter as "investment".Resistance to this project is called "protectionism",

Which the developed countries (those whose social capital is nearly depleted) seek to overcome by fair means or foul.

The process is quite similar to what is necessary to make people "hungry for the right sneaker".

It happened in the West a long time ago, for as Kirkpatrick Sale explains,

It is a prerequisite as well as a consequence of industrialization:

It was the task of industrial society to destroy all of that [reciprocity].

All that "community" implies.Self-sufficiency..Mutual aid.Morality in the marketplace.Stubborn tradition..Regulation by custom..Organic knowledge instead of mechanistic science..Had to be steadily and systematically disrupted and displaced.

All of the practices that kept the individual from being a consumer had to be done away with..So that the cogs and wheels of an unfettered machine called "the economy" could operate without interference..Influenced merely by invisible hands and inevitable balances..Charles Eisenstein